Indieglobalization and the Triumph of Punk in Indonesia

Abstract

‘Punk to me means, it’s a way of life’, says Dolly, a 22-year-old Jakarta punk, to a Canadian film-maker. ‘It’s like a place where I can get freedom and happiness and love’ (Crawford, 2006). One would think that by now, after more than 20 years, the novelty would have worn off. Nonetheless, the no-longer-unusual sight of South-east Asian youths clad in studded black leather jackets, combat boots, and sporting multicoloured mohawks amid palm trees, ramshackle huts, and tropical urban sprawl has recently inspired a photograph book (Resborn and Resborn, 2013), a photo essay in The New Yorker (Dukovic, 2013), and a variety of other efforts at documentation. But Indonesia’s punks, members of a scene over two decades old, are quite uninterested in being cultural curiosities for the Global North. To borrow a phrase from Filipino anthropologist Fernando Nakpil Zialcita (2005), their aim is to be ‘authentic though not exotic’ as they apply the lessons of punk music and culture to their everyday lives in the often-harsh environs of a developing nation. Their dress signals allegiance to a scenic community composed of friends and comrades that in turn connects them to a flourishing planet-wide network of like-minded individuals, all celebrating a music and philosophy whose survival into the twenty-first century struck many in the West as improbable. But it seems that all those reports of the death of punk have been greatly exaggerated. On the contrary, in Indonesia punk is flourishing.